Upon their return to Ledra, Bitterblue and her delegation moved into a hotel.

This wasn’t customary for foreign dignitaries visiting Winterkeep, but Bitterblue was suing a few of the Ledra elite for openly lying to her in the course of trade, which made things awkward. She claimed that her evidence had been “mailed to her anonymously.” Since everyone knew her accusations to be founded, no one seemed prone to interfere.

Bitterblue’s advisers, who’d recently returned to Ledra, and her guards, who’d moved out of the ship to be with her, wandered around the hotel as if in a happy dream. Her advisers kept seeking Bitterblue out, then not knowing what to say. So she would invite them to eat cake with her, knowing that they just needed to sit with her for a while, looking at her, so that they could really believe that she was there. And she needed cake, so it served her purposes too.

They also accompanied her to dinners with the Ledra elite, who tried to one-up each other with how long she stayed at their tables and how much she liked their food. Or at least, that was the impression Bitterblue got. It surprised her, how much the elected leaders of this republic reminded her, at least superficially, of the nobility she contended with at home.

The delegation was renting the entire hotel. It made for empty, silent corridors and a slightly confused hotel staff, but Bitterblue needed the mental space it provided. Of course, it also meant that when a small fire broke out in the remote sitting room Hava used for herself, it took a while for anyone to respond to her calls.

When Bitterblue burst into the room, Giddon and several staff members on her heels, Hava was balanced on a crutch, trying to beat the flaming rug with a pillow.

“Hava!” cried Bitterblue. “Come away!”

“The notebooks!” Hava cried, resisting Bitterblue’s attempts to pull her off. “Linta Massera’s notebooks! They’re burning!”

“What? All of them?”

“I removed a couple of pages yesterday,” said Hava, beginning to cough violently. “The rest is gone.”

Consequently, when the Ledra Magistry arrived a few mornings later to ask whether the Monseans knew anything about the location of Linta’s missing notebooks, Hava handed them a bucket of burnt and sodden scraps, plus two perfectly preserved pages.

When the two pages turned out to be the instructions for mixing a chemical bath into which an egg could be submerged in order to degrade it, rendering it harmless, Bitterblue carefully avoided Giddon’s eyes. The whole thing was suddenly far too convenient.

“I’m so sorry,” Hava kept saying to the Magistry officers, using her Grace to make herself look fluttery and sweet.